Two More Outfits!

I have been busy as hell lately. I have also been sick as a dog, so I haven't been in much of a mood to make posts, even if I was a paragon of regular posting (hur hur).

I did get a Bratz Yasmin, a Bratzillaz Meygana Broomstix and a Fashion Fever Barbie but I'll introduce them properly later. I'm making Monster High clothes, they're here to see if the clothes fit them too and also so I can make clothes from patterns intended for other dolls, make adjustments accordingly and not waste the first version.

But I have been busy making doll clothes - so busy, in fact, that it's hard to know what to show you first! So I guess I'll dig out an outfit each for Isis and Abbey and see what you think of those.

Okay, two outfits for Isis. This one's the boring one.

The First Complete Outfit!

Er, not at this time of writing the only complete outfit, or in fact the first complete garment, but the first bunch of garments that was ready as an ensemble for display. Also, since I am very worthy of my mother's nickname 'Little Bat', and live at the bottom of a valley in the North of England where good light is scarce even when I am awake - the only one I have photos of. With me so far? No? Tough.

It's for Petra!

Monster High Doll Review: Music Festival Abbey Bominable, CAM Mummy and Gorgon set

Or: Meet my girls.

I love Monster High. When I was a kidlet we never had anything so engaging to play with, the fashion dolls I got were Barbies and Sindys, despite the fact that my mother never liked them much. My strongest memory involving a Barbie was the time I bought one just so I could chop off her hair, dress her in army gear and have her go on missions with my brother's Action Men. Monster High would have delighted my weird little heart.

The premise is that these are the children (sometimes the creations or the adoptive children, whatever) of the classic monsters, and they are all going to Monster High. They have delightfully awful punny names and are generally surrounded by sometimes surprisingly clever humour (the son of the Invisible Man, Invisibilly, has as a pet a box that may or may not contain a cat. See what they did there?). The point is that someone at Mattel is clearly having a LOT of fun.

And a LOT of kids are buying these things - they might be monstrous but the characters have a lot more personality and are a lot more easy to identify with than Barbie on her pink pillar in Malibu. In the web series and movies (you can find the series here), they deal with high school and friendship issues more than monster things, and have so far tackled an impressive number of important issues, like bullying, disability discrimination, racial hatred and sexism. And very importantly, all the characters are very different, and all very cool. One of the central messages, like that of MLP:FIM, is that there is no wrong way to be a girl.

They're also very well-made dolls - most have eleven points of articulation where your standard Barbie only has five, their hands come off at the elbow and wrist to make them easier to dress, and each character has her own face mould. This is an impressive number of different face shapes, and it's made them very popular with the BJD artists, especially since previously, you'd have to lay out £150 for a Blythe or a Pullip. Those are still very popular, and I personally make yearning keening noises when I see Momoko dolls, but unfortunately I don't have £200 to throw around.

I spent £45. Let's see what it got me.

Dolls and Mermaids and Yarn, oh my!

You know what, I'm not going to apologise for having been away for so long. At this point it's pretty pointless. I wasn't even going to come back - I'd resigned myself to going to Tumblr for good, and then the latest edit happened and I realised that it's a really bad place to host a craft blog, especially one with long posts and a lot of pictures, so I'm going to post my craft stuff here and link to this blog from both my Tumblogs. My main Tumblr is still gonna stay away from here, though - I am still too much into butts to put it in the sidebar - but you can have my art blog and if you find my other Tumblr from there, more power to you.

So what have I been up to? I promise I haven't been sitting on my tush doing nothing for nearly two years (I actually had to check that it's actually been that long. Good grief). Two days a week I've been interning at the local craft shop, Cheeky Sew and Sew (see their Facebook link in my sidebar), and in the last six months I actually had a commission! A real one! For money! Look!

I made those, they took forever, I was RIGHT up against the deadline and I actually did myself an injury getting them finished in time. They're puppets for a kid's theatre show of The Little Mermaid (the Hans Christian Andersen version, not the Disney version), each one is toddler-sized and the brunette has hair that comes off to reveal short hair underneath. It was, as they say, a right pig. I had never done ANYTHING even REMOTELY like this before (except for that one time I tried to make a Victorian cloth-bodied doll from the Craft Encyclopedia and it failed because it was supposed to have a clay head and so I didn't make the neck long enough for a cloth head and ANYWAY), but you can hardly tell I was basically making it up as you go along!

Also: I HATE HANDS. These things have the stretchy skin layer and also the non-stretchy base layer so that means I had to turn EIGHTY stupid tight frayable fingers right-side out.

Okay.

Breathe.

Before the puppets, I learned how to knit! Well, sorta. This is my first knitting project.

It was actually begun about six years ago, but shortly after I went mum on this blog I dug it out again, realised one ball of pretty blue merino wasn't going to cut it, and decided that I wasn't going to cut corners just because this was my first project, and so this thing is about £50 worth of pure merino. In garter stitch stripes.

It's ridiculously heavy and warm. It goes with that hat tremendously well, which is a pity, because the hat's a spring hat and a touch too light for the weather that suits that scarf.

After that was done, I had some leftover merino and also a laundry hamper full of miscellanous yarn that my mum had offloaded on me, so I took a bunch of blues, whites, reds, greens and greys in roughly the same weights (I still know virtually nothing about yarn weight beyond 'too heavy', 'too thin' and 'superchunky'), got a friend to teach me to make granny squares, and crocheted a blanket. I do not currently have a photo of that, but I will show you when I do.

The crochet has been making way more progress than the knitting, if I'm honest. It's a lot more intuitive.

But now the puppets are done and making their debut, I bought myself a treat - three Monster High dolls, which I am having a blast making clothes for. And planning roomboxes for. And planning furniture for.

Not going to say much about them right now, since they're going to get the next post. Just giving you fair warning. This is why I came back.

Because this is about to become a doll blog.

Mwahahaha.

The Prize Squid!

Well, it has been a while. How are you both?
A number of things have happened to me while I've been away - I've been to see my grandmother in Dorset and taken some photos of her garden, which I may or may not post on this blog. I also got hooked on yet another new thing in addition to Homestuck and Tumblr - it was slightly alarming, even to me, to find myself watching something called 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' and even more alarming to find that it's not only better than it sounds but I actually identify with someone whose given name is Twilight Sparkle. Either standards in children's animation are going up or I need my head read. Possibly both.
The third thing that happened - well, this happened LONG before the last post, but I just didn't tell you because I wanted to make a special post.

I completed the giant squid. The one that was mentioned way back in my first ever post on this blog. And wow, this thing is huge. It has taken a bit over four bags of stuffing and is about five feet long - I haven't measured it - and this picture here was taken with it hanging from the knocker of my front door, so you get an idea of scale.

Now, I was going to give it to my neice right away - it was about five months late, after all - but then my mother reminded me that the following weekend brought a local extravaganza called the Todmorden Agricultural Show. Now, this mostly focuses around horses, sheep, chickens, that sort of thing, but it does have a handicrafts tent. A competetive handicrafts tent.
I was reluctant to enter at first - I'd seen this thing before and it was all very traditional, but after a bit of thought I picked up an entry form and went in. Actually bringing the squid in was amusing - I had it slung over my shoulder and the man walking in front of me kept looking back, I could see him thinking 'I'm being followed by a woman in a horned hat carrying a squid...' but then, that's pretty normal in this town. We do have a community art college, after all.

I didn't really think it'd do very well, but I went back that afternoon, after the judging was over, and what do I see around the 'Open Class' table but a small crowd of people and, once I'd got through them, pinned to one of the tentacles...

Giant squid officially rule. The plan for next year is a steampunk ghost-catcher, among other things. Watch this space, I want more of these certificates.

The Golden Hands Encyclopedia of Crafts (part two)

Goodness, what a long time it's been since my last post! Life has been busy with a great many distractions - I have turned twenty-nine, been visited my my grandmother, been introduced to Homestuck and Tumblr in quick succession*, therefore I have lost a great deal of sleep and more projects than this have fallen by the wayside. Time to pick them up, methinks.

 
 And on that note, where was I? Oh, yes, reviewing the Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia, published by Marshall Cavendish in 1975. Of course they're not on sale now but if you want to keep an eye out, there are the single magazines, and the white PVC binders, and as far as I've seen, most people who collected them managed to get at least one binder, so those are fairly common. Whether there are books other than the one I have I do not know.

I'll start with the magazines themselves, and I'm not going to review them all - that would be highly ambitious and very silly! I've picked out an issue from early in the series and one from late in the series so I can compare what the projects are like.

Issue 6 is not the earliest I have - in fact I have a binder with all the early issues of Crafts, as I have been used to calling it (the reason, as you see, is obvious), but this was the first issue I had with the cover still on, so this is the one you get.

And the cover is important, because each issue has on the back cover either 'Picture Making' or 'Junior Craft Cards' - we'll discuss the former in a minute, but this one has the latter, and says, in simple language with folksy seventies pictures, how to make a simple clothespin doll. A pretty standard craft card, although they did get pretty complex occasionally and at least one of them involved hacksaws (how to make a 'jolly paddle steamer', if you're wondering. Somewhere towards the middle of the series).

Inside the front cover, we have an imperial to metric conversion chart, the usual subscription, credits, etc, and the contents, which explains roughly what's going to be happening in each chapter - I wouldn't remark on it, except that a couple of these have a star beside them for a 'special money-saving, re-cycling chapter' and one has an exclamation mark for 'not suitable for children without adult supervision'. That means Marshall Cavendish think carpentry is suitable for children without adult supervision, because the only one to get this mark is the glass chapter. The chapters in this issue are Glass(!), Clay, Dyeing(*), Crochet, Patchwork(*), Carpentry, Beadwork, Pin Art and Design Know-How, the latter of which you get in, I think, every issue.
Before we get to those, though, we have Creative Ideas, which is also another thing that happens pretty much every issue, and means 'here's something we thought was cool but was too simple or random to actually make a chapter out of'. This one is painted bead necklaces, and it's one of those projects that looks just perfect for a rainy afternoon when there's really nothing better to do and no-one seems to be online.

Finally we get to the actual chapters, and first is Glass 1: Glass Etching Made Simple. After gaining the only danger mark in the whole index, one of the first things the author of the article says is that too many people don't try this because they think glass is dangerous and what silly people they are.** It gives a short history of acid etching and outlines first what the pros use for this - then tells you what you, the amatuer, should be using so you can have fun and get a decent result at the end. There are photos of the finished product, but all the instructional images in this chapter are felt tip drawings - throughout the series, the actual instructional images tend to use a mixture of drawings and photos, but they are always very clear. After discussing everything for about a page, then you get to the actual instructions, which are bullet-pointed step by step instructions and, since I haven't tried glass etching, I can't say how clear the ones in this chapter are, but if they don't make perfect sense upon careful reading, they are definitely the exception. The chapter finishes with a bunch of safety tips, which I would think should come first, but I think the editors assumed you were going to read the whole chapter before starting.

That's a pretty standard chapter layout, but the next chapter, Clay 4, is pretty pedestrian by comparison, and you get 'First Steps in Modelling', with unfired clay. I think the previous clay chapter was about picture tiles, and Crafts has a lot to say about clay. You get to build your own kiln later on and everything.
The next chapter will show you that the index lied to you and 'Dyeing' is actually 'Colour - Dyeing 1'. This one is pretty much entirely theory, and tells you what dyes are, about different types of commercial dyes, special dyes, special problems with dyes and a bit of colour theory. Crochet moves you on from granny squares to circles, Patchwork offers machined squares and rectangles, and Carpentry teaches you how to make 'perfect picture frames'. Any child can do it! Beadwork shows you, basically, how to string seed beads, and was the reason I was very confused when I came to buy seed beads for the first time, because the magazine calls them rocailles, and the bigger ones rotelles. 'Yarn - Pin Art 1' of course shows you how to do those delightfully retro geometric string and pin designs, Design Know-How gives a simple geometry lesson on straight lines, and then finally, in the back cover, you get an addition to your Motif Collection, which this issue is a selection of spiffy tribal-esque African designs.

Issue 95 is again, not the last I have, but issue 98 is actually the index, and the latest issue before that has a Junior Craft Card on the back. This one has a Picture Making piece, which is another 'hey, we thought this was cool' item like Creative Ideas, only generally a lot less practical.
The Creative Ideas this issue basically involves making a painted picture frame to hold your cookie cutters - I can't explain it any better than that.

 But it does show that the reader is expected to have improved a lot over the series. We are presented with Flowers and Plants, in which you can make fantasy flowers out of dried flowers and leaves; Carpentry (chapter 32, this was another popular one) - introduction to wood turning; Leather, which shows you how to make stitched gloves; and Shellcraft (chapter 6, Crafts didn't have much to say about this, clearly), piercing and threading shells. In Beadwork we're still with rocailles (I just like the word) but it's teaching you bead weaving, Basketry has you doing hedgerow work - that is, using undyed materials from hedgerows, Cloth - Upholstery teaches you how to renovate a chaise longue which looks exactly like the one my mum has, only pink. There's no design know-how chapter in this one - presumably by this point you know all the necessary how of design. But there is a section of a Kurdish rug for the motif collection, which reminds me that I really much go through all these and trace the motifs...

 Aaaand that's about it. I'm not going to review the book, it's pretty much the same as the magazines only in bound form. If you can get some of these, do so, they're instructional and inspiring and I can nearly guarantee you'll learn something, maybe find a new hobby. Possibly most importantly in my life, they meant that I wasn't trying to limit myself to just one craft, I had this stack of everything - the chapters I've mentioned here are not half of what was on offer - and so I chose what looked fun.
Sometimes the best thing you can give a budding artist of, oh, twelve years old is a stack of miscellaneous instructional books, a big box of random supplies and permission to see where she goes from there.

* - I am not going to link my Tumblr here, since it's my personal Tumblr and it's already shown a distressing tendency to accumilate, er, alarming Homestuck fanart. What can I say, once a fangirl always a fangirl, even pushing thirty...
** - I may be guilty of hyperbole here, but you get the idea.

Nostalgia Time - The Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia (part one)

Did everyone have a lovely Easter? Lots of chocolate consumed, I hope? I spent the weekend with my Dad's family, and there was a massive family outing to Bolton Abbey, the kind which requires multiple carloads of people, several bags of food and at least one dog (my brother's girlfriend's dog, Lola, obliged). I spent most of the time being towed around at high speed by my six-year-old neice and debating the possible reasons for fountains (don't ask, kid-logic is incredible). The weather has been lovely and a good time has been had by all.

You can make absolutely everything here.

But today's post is about something nice that happened to me before Easter. You see, my town has the best flea market for miles around, and while I was hunting around its many and varied stalls (seriously, you can pick up anything from a WWII army jacket to an old Gameboy, this place rocks), I found this. For £2. Two pounds, people, that is ridiculously cheap.

Does anyone remember the Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia? I won't be surprised if you don't, it was published by Marshall Cavendish in 1975 and is therefore older than me - it was first published as a 98-part partwork and my mother collected, oh, let's say three quarters of it. I'd say about a quarter of the finished product is in this book - unfortunately not all the bits I'm missing, since my collection is missing parts throughout and this book just seems to have the first quarter. But it does have several things I didn't have, and a few pieces of information I'd been looking for for some time. Like, for example, a beginner's guide to crewel embroidery, a whole sheet of motifs that I'd had but had been ripped out of the relavent magazine and gone missing, seaweed marbling - which is that ultra-controlled marbling you see in the endpapers of expensive books, working with Japanese handmade papers - oh, yeah, and especially this.

It doesn't teach you how to make a *real* Faberge egg like the one in the picture. But close.

The collection of magazines I have shows various egg-dying and painting techniques, but this one shows egg-cutting, which was the information I was missing. For one thing, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me to keep the contents of the egg in the shell while cutting it - now I know. But this book shows you everything from single-window cuts to those multiple-panel cuts that make the egg open up like a flower. Hmm, this will, obviously, take practice. Maybe I'll have something to show you by next Easter - the museBOT is thinking maybe we can get hold of a dremel and make a FrankenEgg.

Since I have a lot of GH Crafts magazines and their derivatives, I'm going to leave an actual review for later. In the meantime, how was your Easter? Did you do any egg-dying - or anything more complicated? Tell me in the comments!